Content uploaded by Mardi Reardon-Smith
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Mardi Reardon-Smith on Dec 17, 2024
Content may be subject to copyright.
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
1
Grappling with weeds: invasive species and hybrid landscapes in Cape York Peninsula, far
northeast Australia
Abstract: The control of various introduced species brings to the fore questions around how species are
categorised as ‘native’ or ‘invasive’, belonging or not belonging. In far north Queensland, Australia, the Cape
York region is a complex mixture of land tenures, including pastoral leases, National Parks and Aboriginal land,
and overlapping management agreements. Weed control comprises much of the work that land managers in
Cape York do. However, different land managers target different introduced species for control, and the ways
that certain species are understood as more or less problematic indicates how land managers understand and
seek to order landscapes. Through investigating the various positions that introduced species occupy, I will
explore how Cape York emerges as a ‘hybrid landscape’ that is produced in contested, overlapping and
ambiguous ways, and is rife with ‘feral dynamics’.
Keywords: invasive species; weeds; preferred landscapes; multispecies; Cape York Peninsula
Invasive species management is considered to be an urgent issue across much of Australia
(Kull & Rangan, 2008; Atchison & Head, 2013; Gibbs, Atchison & Macfarlane, 2015). In
such a context, weed control is often framed through the lens of war or a battle, understood as
an ‘epic [drama] of ecological assault by alien plants over native species’ (Kull & Rangan,
2008, p. 1259; Atchison & Head, 2013; Bach & Larson, 2017; Radomski & Perleberg, 2019).
Plants have always travelled across landscapes and permeated borders, sometimes
purposefully dispersed by humans and sometimes seeping into new geographies without
human intervention. How these introduced species are understood, categorised and valued by
people is culturally and ideologically contingent, rather than reflecting any kind of biological
fact (Robbins, 2004; Kull & Rangan, 2008; Head, 2012; Doody et al, 2014). Definitions of
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
2
weeds are slippery, with weeds loosely described as plants which are out of place, but often
being roughly mapped onto a native/non-native binary (Qviström, 2007; Doody et al, 2014).
Nativeness is often equated with belonging, but it is a concept which requires interrogation
(Trigger, 2008; Robbins & Moore, 2012; Bach & Larson, 2017). The distinction between
native and non-native is based on a temporal threshold, which in Australia is considered to be
the time of European colonisation. This temporal threshold is problematic if we consider
colonisation to be a structure, not an event, and furthermore recognises neither the multiple
temporal ‘frontiers’ of colonisation in Australia, nor the agency of First Nations people in
Australia in terms of species distribution (Trigger, Toussaint & Mulcock, 2010; Martin &
Trigger, 2015: 282). Yet, there is a certain moral ‘good’ assigned to native species and a
negative agency assigned to invasive species—with some notable exceptions (Einarsson,
1993; Robbins, 2004; Trigger, 2008; Brice, 2014; Gibbs, Atchison & Macfarlane, 2015).
In weed control, land managers are seeking to return landscapes to some kind of baseline
(Robbins & Moore, 2012; Cooke & Lane, 2015; Deliège, 2016). This baseline differs
between different land managers, reflecting different ways of valuing landscapes and
different ideas of what a preferred landscape is. For some land managers, this baseline is
linked to ideas around a pre-colonial, natural and native wilderness; for others, this baseline
reflects a kind of ‘novel ecosystem’ (Hobbs et al., 2006; Davis et al., 2011) that is valued for
its utility. In landscapes where weeds are rife there are questions around the effectiveness and
utility of weed control, but in this paper, I am interested in what the practices of doing weed
control mean for land managers in seeking to produce preferred landscapes.
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
3
While plants have generally received less attention than animals in multi-species
ethnography, Galvin advocates for ‘more fulsome attention to human-plant relations’ (2018:
234). Describing studies by Braverman and Dove, Galvin suggests that ‘plants, in these
analyses, do things’ (2018: 243) in both the ecological and social realms. To this point, Brice
(2014) has argued that the social cannot be understood without attention to human-plant
engagements and assemblages.
Weed control comprises much of the land management work that settler-descended cattle
graziers, Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service (QPWS) and Aboriginal ranger groups in
Cape York Peninsula, far north Australia, do. As introduced plant species are not always
constrained by fences or land-tenure boundaries, land managers are aware that controlling
these species must be a cohesive and coordinated effort. Different land managers target
different introduced species for control in the areas for which they have responsibility, and
the ways that certain species are understood as more or less problematic indicates the ways in
which land managers understand and seek to order landscapes. For some land managers, like
graziers and Aboriginal traditional owners, weed control is also entwined with reinforcing
their sense of belonging in the region; a sense of belonging that is informed by
multigenerational ties to the area, embodied and experiential knowledge, and economic
relations to land.
. I follow anthropologists Merlan (1998; 2005) and Ottosson (2010) in taking an
‘intercultural’ approach. That is, my research was based on an understanding that while it is
vital to detail and analyse historically shaped cultural differences and forms of inequality that
enable and constrain how particular groups of people can access and belong to land in a
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
4
particular region, it is also important to recognise and investigate those ways of connecting to
and managing land that overlap and are partially shared across such differences.
Anthropologists typically foreground the lives and socio-political conditions of subaltern and
culturally marginal groups. Much of the anthropological scholarship in Cape York has done
just this, providing rich and important accounts of the distinctiveness of Aboriginal
lifeworlds, cultural practices, and political struggles (e.g., Sutton, 1978; Von Sturmer, 1978;
Chase, 1980; Anderson, 1985; Martin, 1993), with some notable exceptions in which
researchers pay close attention to the intercultural domain (e.g., Smith, 2005; Strang, 1997) .
However, there are also important commonalities among Cape York land managers: they all
must interact with the non-human elements, such as cattle, fires, monsoons and weeds, that
are active forces in the landscape. Here, I follow the work of anthropologists and
geographers, such as Braun (2005), Houston et al. (2018), Galvin (2018), Bubandt and Tsing
(2018) and Steele et al. (2019), in paying attention to how the more-than-human world
shapes the social, in cascading and unexpected ways. My analysis strives to extend our
understanding beyond presumed socio-cultural boundaries by attending to the relational and
intercultural processes through which Cape York residents come to value, care for and secure
a livelihood in the changing environment. Significantly, I find that the values, priorities and
practices of these groupings are not necessarily oppositional in an Aboriginal–non-Aboriginal
binary but converge and diverge to varying extents depending on structural conditions, the
particular social and physical context, and the personalities involved. Through paying careful
attention to the day-to-day experiences of settler-descended graziers and QPWS employees,
alongside Aboriginal traditional owners, my research represents an attempt to analyse the
nuance, ambiguity and relationality that characterises land management—and, specifically,
weed control—in Cape York on the ground.
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
5
Cape York is an appropriate and revealing site for this kind of intercultural, ethnographic
inquiry because it sits at the nexus of important political struggles, as well as social, cultural
and environmental changes. Cape York’s significance as a series of protected bioregions of
national concern cannot be underestimated, nor can its importance as a region rich in a
diversity of Aboriginal cultural heritage, contemporary lifeways and Aboriginal cultural and
political struggles. The region has been a testing ground for new forms of land-tenure, for
environmental protection legislation, and for Aboriginal economic development projects. As
noted by Smith (2005), Aboriginal people in Cape York have had to contend with
management and bureaucratisation in several, interrelated guises. Incidents like the Daintree
road dispute that attracted international attention in the 1980s (Anderson, 1989) and the
controversy around changes to the Queensland government’s Wild Rivers legislation in 2010
(Holmes, 2011; Neale, 2017) have revealed cracks in a so-called green-black alliance
between environmentalists and Aboriginal people, as they precipitated the emergence of
divergent aspirations between these groups while also revealing the radically contingent
nature of economic relations to land in the region. Such struggles have also brought to the
fore questions around what Aboriginal autonomy and self-determination can actually look
like.
The rise and fall of the grazing industry has also transformed the landscape of Cape York,
along with the changing socio-cultural makeup of the region. The proliferation of National
Parks and the handing back of land formerly held as pastoral lease to Aboriginal land-owner
groups—particularly since 2008—have further changed regional relations. Cape York is
marginal cattle country, and graziers and Aboriginal Traditional Owners take part in a hybrid
economy, supplementing running cattle with government-funded land management projects,
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
6
engagement in the carbon sequestration scheme, driving trucks and working on the roads.
Moreover, today Cape York is a frontier of environmental and climate change as the impacts
of invasive species, loss of biodiversity, erosion around waterways, rising sea levels and
saltwater inundation are felt. While Cape York land managers hold a range of perspectives on
the concept of climate change—ranging from acceptance of the concept of climate change as
an explanatory model for the environmental changes they are observing, to a more
complicated and ambivalent stance—environmental change is broadly understood as driving
some of the urgency that exists around weed control.
In this paper, I describe and discuss the various methods used by land managers to attempt to
wrangle invasive plant species, in order to tease out the changing cultural and social values
that shape the goals and practices of the main land managing parties in the Cape. I begin with
a discussion of how different land managers approach weed control, and how this may relate
to the broader ways in which different people evaluate and categorise different aspects of
landscapes and how this influences their land management practices. I will show that for the
QPWS rangers, weed control is largely shaped by objectives of ecological protection and
environmental preservation that are mandated by the government policies and departmental
priorities of the time, in order to produce a native and ‘natural’-appearing landscape.
Graziers, too, engage in weed and feral animal control in order to preserve and produce a
particular type of landscape that is conducive to grazing cattle. The way that Aboriginal
rangers manage invasive species is contingent and contextual, sometimes overlapping with
QPWS forms of invasive species management, and sharing some aspects with grazier
invasive species control. As I will show, weed control is entwined with contested visions of
the future of the region—as cattle country, as a ‘natural’-appearing tourist attraction—and the
ongoing and iterative ways that land managers enact a sense of belonging in the region.
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
7
In the analysis, I examine the different practices and knowledges of invasive species
management among these groups. That is, by examining how flora are understood and
categorised by the various land managing groups in south-east Cape York, I will show how
landscapes are produced in contested, overlapping and ambiguous ways, by both humans and
non-humans. This has consequences for how effective the management of invasive species is,
and for the outcomes that different land managers are seeking to achieve. Through a mixture
of cultivation, control and the ‘feral dynamics’ (Bubandt & Tsing, 2018) which emerge
through the unintended effects of the spread of introduced species, Cape York emerges as a
‘hybrid landscape’ (Mulcock & Trigger, 2008); and one that, in the context of environmental
and climate change, will continue to be co-produced by humans and non-humans in urgent
and unexpected ways.
Methodology
This paper is based on 14 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in south-east Cape
York carried out between 2018 and 2019, during which time I lived and worked with settler-
descended cattle graziers, QPWS employees, two Aboriginal ranger groups and other land-
managing parties. The sites include the towns of Cooktown, Hopevale, Laura, Coen and Port
Stewart/Yintjingga, as well as Rinyirru National Park, Lama Lama National Park and a
number of cattle stations adjacent or close to those Parks1. In my fieldwork, I employed the
method of participant-observation, and as such, observed and took part in a variety of day-to-
day activities, including burning landscapes, mustering cattle, fixing fences, attending
1 While I retain the actual names of the National Parks in my research, the names of cattle stations and
individuals have been changed to protect anonymity.
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
8
meetings, cleaning campgrounds, and, importantly, spraying weeds, with my research
participants. Throughout my fieldwork I compiled detailed fieldnotes, alongside photographs
and video recordings.
Over a period of eight months prior to the beginning of my fieldwork I obtained formal
permission to work with QPWS and Rinyirru Aboriginal Corporation and was also invited to
work with Yintjingga Aboriginal Corporation and the Lama Lama Land Trust. Gaining
consent and support to work with cattle graziers was a more gradual and contingent process
and relied heavily on word-of-mouth among the various grazing families in south-east Cape
York—most of whom are related through marriage or descent. My time was divided more or
less equally between each of the different groups of land managers, with the exception that I
spent more time on two particular cattle stations than other cattle stations. While there are
multinational corporation-owned cattle stations in Cape York, the stations I worked with
were small-scale, and owned and managed by families with multigenerational ties to the
region. I also conducted in-depth interviews with key research participants and other
significant land management actors, including senior QPWS staff and employees of Cape
York Natural Resource Management and Cape York Weeds and Feral Animals. Interviews
were transcribed and, along with fieldnotes and archival materials (including local self-
published family histories), were thematically indexed manually.
In this article, I draw on illustrative case studies to discuss how various land managers
respond to and engage with weeds in Cape York.
Unruly plants: invasion and attempts at control
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
9
The spread of invasive plant species is of increasing concern for all land managers in Cape
York. Like much of northern Australia, Cape York is particularly threatened by the spread of
gamba grass (Andropogon gayanus) and grader grass (Themeda quadrivalvis), species which
were initially purposefully introduced in order to provide pasture for cattle and whose
ecological impacts—particularly on the viability of current burning regimes—have become
increasingly evident in recent decades (Neale, 2019). It is the control of these weeds that
groups, like Cape York Natural Resource Management2 (CYNRM) and the Cook Shire
Council3, are directing funding towards. For graziers, though, woody weeds are of greater
concern. Much of the weed control that land managers in Cape York carry out happens
towards the end of the wet season. As grazier Mike explained to me, this is the optimal time
to spray for weeds as many are only just popping up in the wake of the monsoon and they
have not yet gone to seed. If weed control happens after the plant has seeded, it is already too
late.
On a hot, sunny and steamy day in April, I accompany Mike on an expedition to spray
sicklepod. Sicklepod (Senna obtusifolia) is classified as a woody weed. Introduced from
America and trialled as a green manure crop, sicklepod has spread through Cape York
(Mackey, Miller & Palmer, 1997). Sicklepod shrubs grow up to two metres in height and
have soft, rounded green leaves and attractive yellow flowers. It is a competitive weed that
quickly takes over large swathes of land, spread by livestock, tyre treads, boots and water.
Sicklepod seeds remain viable for about ten years, making the plant very difficult to control.
2 Cape York Natural Resource Management is a not-for-profit organisation that helps landholders carry out
sustainability-focused projects and access government grants.
3 As the local government authority, the Cook Shire Council provides landholders in the southern part of Cape
York with funding to carry out weed management projects that align with federal and state government
priorities.
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
10
Graziers target sicklepod, rather than introduced grasses, because sicklepod reduces pasture,
whereas cattle can eat some introduced grasses.
On this day, Mike and I take out two quad bikes and travel to some parts of the property
where sicklepod is becoming problematic. While Mike rides his bike in a methodical grid
formation, spraying weeds from a tank of poison on the back of his bike, I wait in the shade.
Mike has told me that he just wants me there to help him open a few big and unwieldy gates
and in case he goes ‘arse over head’ on his bike. Mike tells me that, in the past, he used to
attack sicklepod more aggressively, spraying in any area on his lease where he was aware it
had cropped up. However, the Cook Shire Council, which assists many landholders in weed
control through providing grants and funding, has stopped focussing on spraying sicklepod in
order to focus on gamba grass and grader grass, and Mike has not been able to keep up a
concerted campaign alone. Instead, he focuses on spraying weeds just around the yards and
lick4 sheds. These are places where he needs easy access and so prefers to keep ‘clean’ of the
weed. Mike says that he knows he will never beat sicklepod; all he can really do is clean up
the areas he needs to have clear. On this occasion, he tells me that he is feeling particularly
pessimistic, as a series of medical appointments have kept him down south in the city of
Cairns for some weeks and he has missed the optimal time to spray. He explains that the
sicklepod may have already seeded and he is concerned he is fighting something of a losing
battle.
Weed control is also a significant activity for the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal rangers in
Rinyirru NP. When I spent time in the Park during the wet season, the focus was firmly on
4 ‘Lick’ is the term graziers use to describe nutritional supplements fed to their cattle.
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
11
lion’s tail (Leonotis leonurus). Lion’s tail is a woody weed from southern Africa. The shrub
can grow up to two metres tall and has dark green leaves with serrated edges and stunning
orange flowers. Lion’s tail is sold as an ornamental shrub in many parts of Australia. It
thrives in disturbed areas and along waterways, and outcompetes native grasses, threatening
biodiversity. The ability to spray lion’s tail is dependent on the weather, as any rain in the
hours after the poison has been administered will wash the plants clean and render the poison
useless.
One wet season afternoon, I clamber into a buggy with Ray, the Ranger in Charge (RIC) for
Rinyirru NP. He passes me a protective face-mask and instructs me to put it on so as not to
ingest any of the chemical that will be using. We are on our way to spend the afternoon
spraying lion’s tail. Ray speeds down the main road through the Park, before cutting into a
section of bushland. He has a GPS in hand and is zig-zagging through the scrub to a plotted
coordinate where lion’s tail had previously been spotted. We reach a clearing dotted with the
tall shrubs. Ray points out the plant to me, describing some of its notable features. He passes
me the nozzle of a hose connected to the tank of poison on the back of our buggy and shows
me the different ways to spray the weed depending on proximity and the wind. A gentle mist
that will coat those plants that are nearby, and a steady jet for those plants further away. Even
through my mask, the poison has a bitter smell. It fuses with the scent of wet earth from the
frequent rain, crushed grass from our bush-bashing and the exhaust of the buggy. Once a
section has been sprayed, we mark the area on a GPS and tie a pink plastic ribbon around a
nearby established tree to ensure that the other teams of rangers do not accidentally double-
up and spray this section again. We spend weeks traversing open clearings and thick and
swampy undergrowth, encountering multiple punctured tyres and becoming bogged in sticky
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
12
mud several times, as we seek out and spray lion’s tail. Usually, once one plant is spotted it
becomes clear that a whole area is inundated with the plant.
According to the rangers, each lion’s tail seed pod contains 400 seeds which have a
germination success rate of between 98 and 100 per cent and the seed bank lasts for seven
years. While there is some ambiguity in the scientific literature around the exact longevity of
lion’s tail seed banks, the plant is considered to be successful and a high priority pest in
Rinyirru National Park (Clarkson, Grice & Dollery, 2012). Cooke and Lane have referred to
soil seedbanks such as these as comprising part of a ‘landscape legacy’ that plays an unseen
role in shaping landscapes and ecologies (2015: 239). In Rinyirru NP, this ‘landscape legacy’
is unseen but is very much held in mind, contributing to a sense among QPWS rangers that
their efforts are likely to be ineffectual. On an afternoon spraying the weed with Ray, I asked
why lion’s tail was the focus. Ray replied that he doesn’t really know why they spray lion’s
tail in particular, given the lack of success with it, but said that they are trying to contain it, or
at least slow the spread. On this day, Ray said despondently that the patches we had come
across were the worst he had ever seen; much larger than in previous years.
Over an afternoon beer, Ray noted that eradication is an unrealistic goal, given that this
would require spraying every single lion’s tail plant for seven years without a single plant
going to seed. Another ranger, Ivan, who previously worked for Biosecurity Queensland5
joked that ‘eradication is a dirty word’. He said that he was pessimistic about the possibilities
of eradicating any weed. Some of the older rangers told me that they have been trying to
control lion’s tail for twenty years now, and the ‘footprint’ of the weed (the geographical area
5 Biosecurity Queensland is a government service separate from QPWS, although some of their work is carried
out on National Parks.
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
13
where it has been found) continues to grow larger. We sprayed the lion’s tail consistently for
a number of weeks, and these outings would frequently provoke questioning from the rangers
about how effective we were. Ivan told me that he had spoken to a botanist employed by
QPWS who believes that rangers should not bother spraying lion’s tail at all given that they
are not achieving any progress with it. The ranger who had been at the Park the longest,
Roger, chipped in and said that probably all we were achieving was to slowly give ourselves
cancer from the poison. Yet, spraying weeds like lion’s tail continues to be a significant part
of the work plan for Rinyirru NP, and a consistent portion of QPWS funding is directed
towards just this.
Graziers and QPWS alike invest significant amounts of time, labour and money into
attempting to control weeds. While, as I discuss below, the purposes of their respective weed
control programs diverge, graziers and QPWS categorise plants in similar ways as either
useful, appropriate and belonging in some sense, or as problematic, invasive and requiring
action. To understand how land managers respond to weeds, it is first important to
problematise the categories through which plants are ordered.
Defining ‘weeds’
Geographer Qviström has argued that ‘weed is not a botanical concept; rather it is defined as
any plant in the wrong place, and therefore a problem or at the very least a plant of no value’
(2007: 272). Bubandt and Tsing define weeds simply as ‘organisms the proliferate without
human planning’ (2018: 2). They suggest that the term ‘weed’ need not be a negative
ascription, saying that ‘the weeds we identify may be good or bad to the humans amidst
whom they thrive. Although they are unplanned, they may become resources for humans;
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
14
alternatively, they may hamper resource utilization—or both’ (Bubandt & Tsing, 2018: 2).
The concept of ‘weed’ works as a kind of metaphor, then, used to describe a landscape that is
disordered. Of course, while the definition of weeds may be slippery and contingent, plants
designated as weeds in Cape York do have tangible effects on ecosystems and economic
futures, with the spread of weeds impacting biodiversity, visual amenity, the availability of
pasture and the viability of fire regimes. Importantly, weeds (and their impacts) are not static.
Bubandt and Tsing (2018) note that, although many plants now considered ‘weeds’ were
initially introduced deliberately by humans, the movement and mobility of such species
means that they come to exist in ways that are unexpected and, frequently, problematic for
humans. As they write, ‘humans are given back landscapes differently than the ones they
imagined and sought to make’ (Bubandt & Tsing, 2018, p. 2). Such unintended collaborations
that emerge as a result of these interactions between humans and plants (‘feral dynamics’)
precipitate human attempts to control, discipline and reorder landscapes.
For land managers in Cape York, I suggest that weed control is ultimately an attempt to
reorder landscapes in a way that encourages certain landscape attributes that are preferable to
particular groups for specific reasons. Graziers seek to control weeds in order to maintain
pasture for cattle grazing, an aspiration that is tied to both economics (as cattle are dependent
on pasture) and to carrying on a valued way of life (as the social category of ‘grazier’ is
reliant upon grazing). For their part, QPWS rangers are following policy guidelines which
require them to work towards cultivating a ‘natural’—which we can read as ‘native’—
landscape. Aboriginal rangers, as I describe below, tend to position weed control as part of a
broader project of caring for the landscape and the ancestral spirits that inhabit it. Other
stakeholders, such as CYNRM, Cook Shire Council and the federal and state governments,
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
15
are concerned with ensuring the viability of fire regimes in order to maintain the carbon
sequestration program and thus safeguard the economic future of Cape York.
To disentangle these preferences and specific reasons we not only need to deconstruct the
categorisation of ‘weeds’; the concepts of native and non-native also require interrogation.
Even in the biological sciences there is ambiguity around the categories of native and non-
native. Head, citing Chew and Hamilton, notes that the concept of biotic nativeness is
‘theoretically weak and internally inconsistent’, and does not stand up to empirical scrutiny
(2012: 168). She argues that, ‘when analysed closely, characterisations such as nativeness tell
us more about human bounding practices than anything inherent about the plants and their
evolutionary processes’ (Head, 2012: 171). The categories of non-native and invasive are
sometimes unhelpfully conflated, leading to calls for land management and weed control to
be concerned with plant behaviour (invasiveness) rather than categorisation (native or non-
native) (Head, 2017: 3; Head & Muir, 2004: 201; Radomski & Perleberg, 2019). Head writes,
‘if nativeness is not a robust concept in biological or ecological terms, its use as an axiom of
management – supposedly founded on that science – is problematic’ (2012: 174). She goes
on to acknowledge that while it is important and worthwhile to attempt to manage invasive
species, the focus should be on plant behaviours and characteristics rather than on
categorisations of native or non-native. Head points out that invasive species are often
attributed a level of negative agency which native plants are not thought to have (2016: 124).
In Cape York, the way that plants are categorised as belonging or in need of control is related
more to the behaviour of the plant, and its potential utility, than to its status as native or
introduced. For instance, the introduced species of mango, banana, tamarind and lemon that
grow throughout Cape York are ambiguous but relatively uncontentious. These are species
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
16
valued by a diversity of land managers because of their use as a food source, but not targeted
for control. Here, the arbitrary categories of native and non-native are not deployed and
instead, the behaviour and possible use of the plant species in question is what is important
(Head, 2016; Kull & Rangan, 2008). In relation to the Gulf of Carpentaria, Trigger has
written that, ‘the land itself is now hybrid with introduced living things, some… regarded as
environmentally destructive, while [others]… have been incorporated by all as positive’
(2016: 299). These fruit trees are introduced, but they do not tend to spread in a way that is
uncontrolled and problematic. Instead, the plants which are attributed negative agency are
species like lion’s tail, sicklepod and gamba grass—plants which variously threaten
livelihoods, conservation values and amenity. As Qviström (2007) suggests, managing weeds
is about creating order in a landscape. Such ‘ordering’ can be understood as preserving or
shaping an ‘appropriate’ or ‘natural’ landscape. What counts as ‘natural’ or ‘appropriate’
differs from land manager to land manager, and as such Trigger (2013) argues that it is
pertinent to critically consider what the ‘baseline’ is that we seek to return landscapes to.
Such a ‘baseline’ becomes particularly problematic if it is an imagined, pre-human, and
pristine wilderness that land managers are seeking to produce (Cronon, 1996; Robbins &
Moore, 2012; Shotwell, 2016).
Weed control and preferred landscapes
While only introduced species with invasive behaviours are targeted for control, different
species are prioritised by people for specific reasons. In the case of QPWS, a mixture of
factors determine which weeds are targeted for control. These factors include a departmental
requirement to target specific species that have been identified as urgent by Biosecurity
Queensland, the observations by on-the-ground rangers and the region-wide weed
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
17
management team about weed proliferation, and the outcome of joint management meetings
with Aboriginal traditional owners. QPWS have obligations to engage in weed control under
the Biosecurity Act 2014, the Nature Conservation Act 1992 and the Forestry Act 1959
(Queensland Government, 2017). While these priorities are geared towards an outcome in
which the spread of invasive species is mitigated or stopped, the actual practice of controlling
weeds remains important for the institutional culture of QPWS. For QPWS rangers, there
appears to be importance placed on being ‘seen to be doing something about weeds’
(Atchison & Head, 2013: 961), even as rangers remain uncertain about the possibility of
success with weed control programs. This is so even where such efforts are understood by
rangers to be having little effect—as with the spraying of lion’s tail.
While a Park without weeds is not possible, the effort to control and aspiration to eradicate
weeds is about the preservation of a particular type of preferred landscape. A key aim of the
Nature Conservation Act 1992 is to protect ‘the biological diversity of native wildlife and its
habitat’ (s. 5d). Biological diversity is here defined as ‘the natural diversity of native wildlife,
together with the environmental conditions necessary for their survival’ (s. 10.1). While there
is no specific definition given for invasive species, weeds or ecosystem biodiversity in this
Act, the Act is geared towards preserving a loosely defined ‘natural diversity’ of species (s.
10.1). From the actions of QPWS rangers, though, a preferred landscape would seem to be
one devoid of introduced plant species. While the various pieces of legislation which
mandate the control of invasive species for QPWS are geared towards protecting biodiversity,
in practice weed control serves multiple purposes.
For some QPWS rangers, the control of weeds is related to preserving the amenity of
National Parks for the visual enjoyment of tourists. Such a point was illustrated one evening
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
18
when a senior ranger arrived at the base having driven around the northern section of
Rinyirru NP. Somewhat defeatedly, she spoke about the proliferation of gamba grass along
the roadside near a section of the Park called Nifold Plains. In a similar vein to the
introduction of buffel grass (Cenchrus ciliaris)6 in the Northern Territory and Central
Queensland, gamba grass was initially introduced to provide pasture for cattle and has since
spread widely throughout northern Australia. Gamba grass now represents a threat to the
continuance of existing fire regimes due to the grass having a higher oil content than native
grasses and, thus, causing hotter and more out-of-control wildfires than native grasses. The
current situation with gamba grass represents the kind of ‘feral dynamics’ discussed by
Bubandt and Tsing (2018). The spread of gamba grass is, ultimately, the result of a human
and non-human collaboration; a nexus of cattle, graziers, the Department of Primary
Industries (who encouraged planting gamba grass as pasture in Northern Australia until very
recently), the landscape and the climate, which has resulted in reduced native grasses and an
increased risk of hot fires—threats which make the already contingent economic future of
Cape York even more precarious. In their work on gamba grass spread in the Northern
Territory, Neale and Macdonald have described the proliferation of gamba grass as a ‘slow
disaster’, drawing particular attention to the risk the grass poses to the continuation of the
carbon sequestration scheme7 (2019). While these aspects of gamba grass are of great
concern to QPWS, on this occasion the senior QPWS ranger framed her frustrations around
the impact the grass may have on the amenity of the Park. One of the more visually stunning
parts of Rinyirru NP, Nifold Plains is an open expanse, dotted with towering termite mounds
6 While buffel grass is a declared weed and has been described as a threat to biodiversity in parts of South
Australia, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and central Queensland, it is not a species of concern in
Cape York (CRC for Australian Weed Management, 2008).
7 The carbon sequestration scheme is predicated on controlled burning being undertaken in Northern Australia
between January and June, but the proliferation of gamba grass has resulted in an increased risk of out-of-
control wildfires occurring in the later part of the year. See (Neale, 2019) and (Neale & Macdonald, 2019) for
further detail.
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
19
and little else. Photographs of the plains often feature in tourism brochures and four-wheel
driving guides to the region. The ranger suggested that tourists would be hugely disappointed
if they travelled to see Nifold Plains and were greeted instead by a wall of gamba grass,
obscuring the plains from view. In this way, gamba grass threatens the future viability of
tourism; a key, emerging industry for the region.
Whether provoked by a desire to protect biodiversity or preserve the amenity of National
Parks, weed control by QPWS represents the valuation of a particular type of ‘natural’
landscape. This is related to the preservationist model that National Parks are based upon,
and a reverence for a separate and external Nature as expressed in the writings of American
naturalists like John Muir (Tsing, 2005). Descola (2013) and Cronon (1996) have suggested
that such romanticism and reverence towards Nature emerged as a response to large-scale
industrialisation and contributed to the idea that Nature should be enjoyed and visited as
something external, separate and sublime. As Tsing writes, Muir and his contemporaries
imagined themselves as cosmopolitan visitors in this sublime and wild Nature, and such a
sentiment informed the creation of National Parks in the US and elsewhere (2005: 95-96).
This reading of landscapes as wildernesses necessitated the exclusion and erasure of people
who used and relied upon such landscapes for subsistence. Indigenous people were erased
and excluded by the Yellowstone model of National Parks, and this practice of dispossessing
Indigenous peoples for the purposes of conserving landscapes is evident across the world in a
variety of contexts (Tsing, 2005, p. 100; Doolittle, 2005; West, 2006). Even in contemporary
situations of formal co-management of National Parks by QPWS and Aboriginal
corporations, where there is legal recognition that the presumed ‘wilderness’ of Australia is
actually a landscape that has been actively managed by Aboriginal people for tens of
thousands of years, these persistent ideas about ‘wilderness’ tend to endure and inform some
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
20
QPWS practices (Adams & Mulligan, 2002; Langton, 2002; Slater, 2013). As pointed out by
Slater (2013), it is such environments’ proximity to ‘naturalness’ that designates them as
worthy of care and concern.
The exclusion of Indigenous people from this model of conservation is significant because it
negates the human role in the distribution of species and creation of landscapes. These
exclusions helped to create the myth of a ‘natural landscape’ untouched by human hands.
However, like almost everywhere on earth, landscapes in Cape York are anthropogenic
landscapes, shaped by millennia of human activities, care, exploitation and labour (Langton,
1998). More recently, landscapes in Cape York have been altered by the pastoral industry.
Shotwell (2016) has argued that environments all over the world are already contaminated.
She writes that, ‘we are all living after events that have changed, and frequently harmed,
ecosystems and biospheres’ (Shotwell, 2016: 9). In order for the landscape of the National
Park to appear natural and aligned with the imagined wilderness sought by tourists, a great
deal of human labour is necessary. Weed control is one aspect of the enormous amount of
labour that goes into ordering the landscape, resulting in a landscape that appears to be wild
and untouched.
A different perspective indicating a different kind of preferred landscape emerged from my
discussions with Rinyirru Aboriginal Corporation ranger and traditional owner Donna. As
with all of the Land Trust rangers, Donna was only employed during the dry season—the
result of complex funding arrangements. Upon her return to the Park after the wet season, she
identified several areas that she claims to have previously worked to keep clear of weeds.
Seeing the growth of these weeds, Donna told me that she thought the proliferation of weeds
in the Park was ‘disrespectful to the land’. Her comments about the state of these areas now,
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
21
in the wake of her absence, indicate that she perceived weed spread in these areas to relate to
a lack of care and attention to changes in the landscape on the part of QPWS rangers. This
aligns with Førde and Magnussen’s research on how the spread of weeds in a rural
Norwegian community resulted in a sense among locals that the landscape had ‘deteriorated’
and had been ‘abandoned’ (2015: 190). Similarly, Bach and Larson (2017) have described
how, for Indigenous elders in the Kimberley, the presence of weeds could indicate that a
landscape was ‘sick’ or ‘down’, because local Aboriginal people had not fulfilled their
responsibilities to care for country.
Donna seems to understand weed control as an alternative method of ‘keeping the country
“clean”’ (Rose, 1992: 106), a responsibility for Aboriginal traditional owners that is normally
associated with burning the landscape. The literature on Aboriginal connection to the
landscape in Cape York emphasises the importance of humanising the landscape through
regularly visiting, camping, using and burning the land (Von Sturmer, 1978; Martin, 1993),
processes which have been complicated by the histories of colonisation, pastoralism and,
now, preservationist conservation in the region (Smith, 2006). It is through these activities
that a mutually constitutive relationship between people and land is created (Merlan, 1998;
Povinelli, 2016). Just as burning and regularly visiting tracts of land are understood by
Aboriginal traditional owners as significant in maintaining a connection with a landscape and
the ‘old people’ (ancestral spirits) dwelling there, so too can weed control emerge as a way to
‘let the country know that people are there’ (Rose, 1992: 106).
Donna’s focus on weed control as a method for fulfilling her obligations to the land and ‘old
people’ has emerged from the context of intercultural knowledge sharing she has encountered
in her work alongside QPWS rangers. While her desire to care for land through physical
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
22
engagement predates her employment at Rinyirru NP, it is through her work as a ranger and
her training in a Western scientific form of land management that weed control has emerged
as one of the ways in which she understands caring for land to occur. For Donna, then,
controlling weeds is less about preserving a particular kind of landscape than it is about
maintaining a particular kind of relationship to the land. In engaging in weed control,
Donna—like the QPWS rangers—is concerned with the actual practice of weed control; with
being ‘seen to be doing something’ (Atchison & Head, 2013: 961). However, in ‘do[ing]
something’ she is seeking to show care and respect to the ‘old people’ of the landscape,
whereas QPWS staff are attending to departmental, funding and management requirements.
For those QPWS staff who are also Aboriginal Traditional Owners for the Park, these
differing priorities blur as, through weed control, these rangers fulfil their obligations to the
landscape, their ancestors and the Queensland Government simultaneously.
The way that graziers approach weed control indicates a similar aspiration to preserve a
particular kind of landscape as was found among QPWS rangers—although in the case of
graziers, this preferred landscape is a pastoral one. For graziers, the actual act of weed control
is less significant than the outcome. Graziers seek to ensure that they have sustainable pasture
in order to continue running cattle. Hence, the focus on woody weeds over invasive grasses is
logical for graziers as it is woody weeds, not introduced grasses, which threaten their pasture.
While acknowledging that these introduced grasses do pose a threat, especially in terms of
impacting on burning practices and bushfire risk, graziers assert that because cattle eat these
grasses, they do not require immediate attention, and they may even provide some benefit.
Some graziers suggested that introduced grasses like gamba grass actually mitigate erosion,
particularly along waterways. In the sense that it can function as pasture and to mitigate
erosion, gamba grass can be considered by graziers to be ‘useful plant’, rather than a
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
23
‘problematic weed’ (Kull & Rangan, 2008: 1270). Where invasive species are understood to
hold utility, coexistence with such species becomes possible (Atchison & Head, 2013).
Graziers are thus more concerned with the spread of woody weeds which compete with and
ultimately greatly reduce pasture.
The ways in which graziers value land and understand their place in the landscape of Cape
York is evident in their efforts to preserve and protect pastureland. As with Donna, graziers
are concerned with maintaining a particular relationship to land; one which is based upon a
valuation of their economic relationship to land and embodied sense of place. As I have
discussed elsewhere (the author, 2021), graziers’ relationships to land are based upon their
ability to work in, on and with landscapes. The economic viability of their industry in the
region is reliant on their ability to produce pasture which can support cattle. Their weed
control is aimed at ensuring this. But with weeds like sicklepod not drawing the attention of
other land management groups in the region, graziers are limited in their ability to mitigate
the spread of such weeds. In the same way that gamba grass represents a ‘slow disaster’ for
the viability of the carbon sequestration scheme (Neale & Macdonald, 2019), so too does the
spread of woody weeds represent a gradual threat towards the viability of the grazing
industry.
Just as animals like cattle and sheep have functioned as colonial agents, so too have
introduced plants been used to re-construct landscapes for political and economic purposes,
sometimes deliberately and sometimes unexpectedly (Dominy, 2003; Gavin, 2018). Plants in
Cape York also ‘do things’ (Galvin, 2018). Gamba grass, introduced deliberately and initially
planted as pasture for cattle at the encouragement of the Department of Primary Industries
(Atchison & Head, 2013; Petty, 2013), disrupts existing fire-regimes with its high fuel load.
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
24
Sicklepod, introduced as a green manure crop, competes with pasture, threatening graziers’
livelihoods and exacerbating tensions between graziers and Aboriginal ranger groups, Cook
Shire Council and CYNRM. Lion’s tail, an escaped introduced ornamental shrub, competes
with native grasses and threatens biodiversity. Different weeds and their various impacts
make precarious the established forms of land management that exist in the region,
particularly for graziers. In this sense, plants ‘bring into being’ (Galvin, 2018: 243) new
frictions, tensions and relationships among humans and between humans and landscapes. As
the spread of invasive plant species continues, aided and abetted by a changing climate and
an increasingly mobile human community as tourism to the Cape becomes increasingly
accessible, weeds and land managers are likely to become more entwined.
Conclusion
The categories by which non-human species are ordered are culturally and socially important,
and, as Head (2017) has suggested, can reveal much about human bounding practices.
Through the deployment of categories like native and non-native, introduced and invasive,
feral and pest, species are situated as belonging or not-belonging in a region. The ascription
of these categories spreads into practices which work to order landscapes in particular ways,
related to how different groups of people understand, rely on and relate to land.
As with all landscapes on earth, Cape York is a ‘hybrid landscape’ (Mulcock & Trigger,
2008) impacted by climate change, human activity and the global movement of resources and
species. In addition, as Bubandt and Tsing have suggested, some anthropogenic landscapes
are not solely of human design, but emerge as a result of ‘the cascading effects of more-than-
human negotiations’ (2018: 1). Lion’s tail was intended as an ornamental garden shrub,
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
25
sicklepod as a green manure crop, and gamba grass was originally intended to provide stock
feed. Each of these species has seeped beyond the confines of their imagined and intended
existence, trickling into new geographies and ecosystems and accumulating ‘weediness’
along the way. Bubandt and Tsing refer to these spaces of new kinds of unexpected relating
as imbued with ‘feral dynamics’ (2018).
Cape York is a place rife with these ‘feral dynamics’, as humans and non-human species are
brought into unintended relationships that sometimes represent collaboration and often result
in human effort to exert control. Such relationships are frequently informed by economics, as
in Cape York landscapes, labour and livelihoods are intimately entwined. When people go to
grapple with invasive species, their economic relationship to land is part of the grounds of
encounter. This is because it is through making a viable living on and with the land that
people are able to form meaningful attachments to land, and craft meaningful senses of
belonging. The categories that different species are ascribed differ from land manager to land
manager, just as notions of what a preferred landscape or appropriate use of land is changes
depending on who you ask. Relationships between humans, non-human plant species and
landscapes are contingent, contextual and continually co-produced in intercultural and
interspecies assemblages.
REFERENCES
Adams, W. & Mulligan, M. 2002. ‘Introduction.’ In W. Adams & M. Mulligan (eds),
Decolonizing Nature: Strategies for Conservation in a Post-colonial era, pp. 1-15. Taylor &
Francis Group.
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
26
Anderson, C. 1989. ‘Aborigines and Conservationism: The Daintree-Bloomfield Road’.
Australian Journal of Social Issues 24(3): 214-227.
Anderson, J.C. 1985. ‘The Political and Economic Basis of Kuku-Yulanji social history’.
PhD Thesis, The University of Queensland.
Atchison, J. & Head, L. 2013. ‘Eradicating bodies in invasive plant management’.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31: 951-968.
Bach, T.M. & Larson, B.M.H. 2017. ‘Speaking About Weeds: Indigenous Elders’ Metaphors
for Invasive Species and Their Management’. Environmental Values 26(5): 561-581.
Brice, J. 2014. ‘Attending to grape vines: perceptual practices, planty agencies and multiple
temporalities in Australian viticulture’. Social & Cultural Geography 15(8): 942-965.
Braun, B. 2005. ‘Environmental issues: writing a more-than-human urban geography’.
Progress in Human Geography 29(5): 635-650.
Bubandt, N. & Tsing, A. 2018. ‘Feral Dynamics of Post-Industrial Ruin: An Introduction’.
Journal of Ethnobiology 38(1): 1-7.
Chase, A.K. 1980. ‘Which Way Now? Tradition, Continuity and Change in a North
Queensland Aboriginal Community’. PhD Thesis, The University of Queensland.
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
27
Clarkson, J.R., Grice, A.C. & Dollery, C. 2012. ‘Chasing the lion’s tail. The value of
program review: a case study from the management of Leonatis nepetifolia (L.) R.Br. in
Rinyirru (Lakefield) National Park’. Eighteenth Australasian Weeds Conference: 53-56.
Cooke, B. & Lane, R. 2015. ‘Re-thinking rural-amenity ecologies for environmental
management in the Anthropocene’. Geoforum 65: 232-242.
CRC for Australian Weed Management 2008. Weed Management Guide: Buffel Grass
(Cenchrus ciliaris). The State of New South Wales (Department of Primary Industries).
https://archive.dpi.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/347153/buffel-grass-weed-
management-guide.pdf (accessed 19 January 2022).
Cronon, W. 1996. ‘The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’.
Environmental History 1(1): 7-28.
Davis, M.A., Chew, M.K., Hobbs, R.J., Lugo, A.E., Ewel, J.J., Vermeij, G.J., Brown, J.H.,
Rosenzweig, M.L., Gardener, M.R., Carroll, S.P., Thompson, K., Pickett, S.T.A., Stromberg,
J.C., Del Tredici, P., Suding, K.N., Ehrenfeld, J.G., Grime, J.P., Mascaro, J. & Briggs, J.C.
2011. ‘Don’t judge species on their origins’. Nature 474: 153-154.
Deliège, G. 2016. ‘Contact! Contact! Nature Preservation as the Preservation of Meaning’.
Environmental Values 25(4): 409-425.
Descola, P. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. University of Chicago Press.
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
28
Dominy, M.D. 2003. ‘Hearing grass, thinking grass: Postcolonialism and ecology in
Aotearoa-New Zealand’. In D. Trigger & G. Griffiths (eds), Disputed Territories: Land,
Culture and Identity in Settler Societies, pp. 53-80. Hong Kong University Press.
Doody, B.J., Perkins, H.C., Sullivan, J.J., Meurk, C.D. & Stewart, G.H. 2014. ‘Performing
weeds: Gardening plant agencies and urban plant conservation’. Geoforum 56: 124-136.
Doolittle, A.A. 2005. Property & Politics in Sabah, Malaysia: Native struggles over land
rights. Culture, Place and Nature. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press.
Einarsson, N. 1993. ‘All animals are equal but some are cetaceans: Conservation and culture
Conflict’. In K. Milton (ed.), Environmentalism: The view from anthropology, pp. 73–84.
London: Routledge.
Førde, A. & Magnussen, T. 2015. ‘Invaded by weeds: contested landscape stories’.
Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 97(2): 183–193.
Galvin, S.S. 2018. ‘Interspecies Relations and Agrarian Worlds’. Annual Review of
Anthropology 47: 233-249.
Gibbs, L., Atchison, L. & Macfarlane, I. 2015. ‘Camel country: Assemblage, belonging and
scale in invasive species geographies’. Geoforum 58: 56-67.
Head, L. 2012. ‘Decentring 1788: beyond biotic nativeness’. Geographical Research 50:
166-78.
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
29
Head, L. 2016. Hope and grief in the Anthropocene: Re-conceptualising human–nature
relations. Routledge.
Head, L. 2017. ‘The social dimensions of invasive plants’. Nature plants 3(6): 1-7.
Head, L. & Muir, P. 2004. ‘Nativeness, invasiveness, and nation in Australian plants’. The
Geographical Review 94: 199-217.
Hobbs, R.J., Arico, S., Aronson, J., Baron, J.S., Bridgewater, P., Cramer, V.A., Epstein, P.R.,
Ewel, J.J., Klink, C.A., Lugo, A.E., Norton, D., Ojima, D., Richardson, D.M., Sanderson,
E.W., Valladares, F., Vilà, M., Zamora, R. & Zobel, M. 2006. ‘Novel ecosystems: theoretical
and management aspects of the new ecological world order’ Global Ecology and
Biogeography 15: 1-7.
Holmes, J. 2011. ‘Contesting the future of Cape York Peninsula’. Australian Geographer
42(1): 53-68.
Houston, D., Hillier, J., MacCallum, D., Steele, W. & Byrne, J. 2018. ‘Make kin, not cities!
Multispecies entanglements and ‘becoming-world’ in planning theory’. Geography, Urban
Studies & Planning 17(2): 190-212.
Kull, C.A. & Rangan, H. 2008. ‘Acacia exchanges: Wattles, thorn trees, and the study of
plant movements’. Geoforum 39: 1258-1272.
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
30
Langton, M. 1998. Burning Questions: Emerging Environmental Issues for Indigenous
Peoples in Northern Australia. Centre for Indigenous Natural and Cultural Resource
Management. Northern Territory University.
Langton, M. 2002. ‘The ‘wild’, the market and the native: Indigenous people face new forms
of global colonisation’. In W. Adams & M. Mulligan (eds), Decolonizing Nature: Strategies
for Conservation in a Post-colonial era, pp. 79-107. Taylor & Francis Group.
Martin, D.F. 1993. ‘Autonomy and Relatedness: An Ethnography of Wik People of Aurukun,
Western Cape York Peninsula’. PhD Thesis. Australian National University, Canberra.
Martin, R.J. & Trigger, D. 2015. ‘Negotiating belonging: plants, people, and indigeneity in
northern Australia’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21: 276-295.
Merlan, F. 1998. Caging the Rainbow: Places, Politics and Aborigines in a North Australian
town. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Merlan, F. 2005. ‘Explorations Towards Intercultural Accounts of Socio-Cultural
Reproduction and Change’. Oceania 75(3): 167-182.
Mulcock, J. & Trigger, D. 2008. ‘Ecology and identity: A comparative perspective on the
negotiation of ‘nativeness’. In D. Wylie (ed.), Toxic Belonging? Identity and Ecology in
Southern Africa, pp. 178-198. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Nature Conservation Act 1992 (Qld).
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
31
Neale, T. 2017. Wild Articulations: Environmentalism and Indigeneity in Northern Australia.
Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Neale, T. 2019. ‘A Sea of Gamba: Making Environmental Harm Illegible in Northern
Australia’. Science as Culture 28(4): 403-426.
Neale, T. & Macdonald J.M. 2019. ‘Permits to burn: weeds, slow violence and the extractive
future of northern Australia’. Australian Geographer 50(4): 417-433.
Ottosson, A. 2010. ‘Aboriginal Music and Passion: Interculturality and Difference in
Australian Desert Towns’. Ethnos 75(3): 275-300.
Petty, A. 2013. ‘Field of nightmares: gamba grass in the Top End’. The Conversation, 19
February. https://theconversation.com/field-of-nightmares-gamba-grass-in-the-top-end-12178
(accessed 20 January 2021).
Povinelli, E. 2016. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Duke University Press.
Queensland Government 2017. Pest plants and animals. The State of Queensland
(Department of Environment and Science).
https://parks.des.qld.gov.au/management/programs/pest-plants-
animals#how_does_qpws_manage_pest (accessed 9 December 2020).
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
32
Mackey, A.P., Miller, E.N. & Palmer, W.A. 1997. Sicklepod (Senna obtusifolia) in
Queensland. The State of Queensland (Department of Natural Resources and Mines).
https://www.daf.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/63875/IPA-Sicklepod-PSA.pdf
(accessed 20 September 2020).
Qviström, M. 2007. ‘Landscapes out of order: studying the inner urban fringe beyond the
rural–urban divide’. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 89(3): 269–282.
Radomski, P. & Perleberg, D. 2019. ‘Avoiding the Invasive Trap: Policies for Aquatic Non-
Indigenous Plant Management’. Environmental Values 28(2).
http://dx.doi.org/10.3197/096327119X15515267418539
The author (2021). ‘“We are the ones who know the intimacies of the soil”: Grazier claims to
belonging and changing land relations in Cape York Peninsula, Queensland’. The Australian
Journal of Anthropology.
Robbins, R. 2004. ‘Comparing Invasive Networks: Cultural and Political Biographies of
Invasive Species’. The Geographical Review 94(2): 139-156.
Robbins, P. & Moore, S.A. 2012. ‘Ecological anxiety disorder: diagnosing the politics of the
Anthropocene’. Cultural Geographies 20(1): 3-19.
Rose, D.B. 1992. Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in an Australian Aboriginal
Culture. Cambridge University Press.
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
33
Shotwell, A. 2016. Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. Minneapolis:
University of Minneapolis Press.
Slater, L. 2013. ‘‘Wild rivers, wild ideas’: emerging political ecologies of Cape York Wild
Rivers’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31: 763-778.
Smith, B.R. 2005. ‘‘We got our own management’: local knowledge, government and
development in Cape York Peninsula’. Australian Aboriginal Studies 2: 4-15.
Smith, B.R. 2006. ‘‘More than Love’: Locality and Affects of Indigeneity in Northern
Queensland’. The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 7(3): 221-235.
Steele, W., Wiesel, I. & Maller, C. 2019. ‘More-than-human cities: Where the wild things
are’. Geoforum 106: 411-415.
Strang, V. 1997. Uncommon Ground: Cultural Landscapes and Environmental Values.
Oxford & New York: Berg.
Sutton, P.J. 1978. ‘Wik: Aboriginal society, territory and language at Cape Keerweer, Cape
York Peninsula, Australia’. PhD Thesis. The University of Queensland.
Trigger, D.S. 2008. ‘Indigeneity, Ferality, and What ‘Belongs’ in the Australian Bush:
Aboriginal Responses to ‘Introduced’ Animals and Plants in a Settler-Descendant Society’.
The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14(3): 628-646.
Mardi Reardon-Smith Environmental Values – Accepted
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au Pre-print
34
Trigger, D. 2013. ‘Rethinking Nature and Nativeness’. In C. Shore & S. Trnka (Eds), Up
Close and Personal: On Peripheral Perspectives and the Production of Anthropological
Knowledge, pp. 142-157. Berghahn Books.
Trigger, D. 2016. ‘Shared country, different stories: a post-settler vignette’. In J.-C.
Verstraete & D. Hafner (eds), Land and Language in Cape York Peninsula and the Gulf
Country, pp. 285-302. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Trigger, D.S., Toussaint, Y. & Mulcock, J. 2010. ‘Ecological restoration in Australia:
environmental discourses, landscape ideals, and the Significance of Human Agency’. Society
and Natural Resources 23(11): 1060-1074.
Tsing, A. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton University Press.
Von Sturmer, J.R. 1978. ‘The Wik Region: Economy, Territoriality and Totemism in
Western Cape York Peninsula, North Queensland’. PhD Thesis. The University of
Queensland.
West, P. 2006. Conservation Is Our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New
Guinea. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
